Wampum

Samurai Spy

This morning's Samurai Saturday feature is the 1965 work by Mashahiro Shinoba "Ibun sarutobi sasuke". Sasuke Sarutobi tracks Nojiri in the ambiguous war of spies between Edo and Osaka, in the months leading up to the Winter War of Osaka, 14 years after the Battle of Sekigahara of 1600. I'm fairly confused 70 minutes into the film, Gracie is utterly lost, and that is the point. Who spies for whom, and how is that known? The last minutes are fog and betrayal upon betrayal.

In todays' Le Monde there is a must-read on the evolution of al Qaida. Why is Les polices occidentales découvrent les nouvelles formes d'Al-Qaida a "must-read"? Because either one believes that the better response to 9/11 was investigatory, followed by arrests, the legal response within the international law framework, or one believes that the better response to 9/11 was retaliatory, followed by pursuits, the military response within the force structure framework. The intelligence product of the two approaches can be distinguished, and the point of the article in Le Monde is that European law enforcement and intelligence services have reached conclusions different from the American military and intelligence services.

Let's read the summary together:

Les services européens engagés dans la lutte antiterroriste sont revenus de leur scepticisme initial sur la réalité de la menace ayant conduit les Etats-Unis à relever le niveau d'alerte sur leur territoire le 1er août. Après trois semaines d'examen des renseignements recueillis à la faveur des dernières arrestations, au Pakistan et en Grande-Bretagne, ils constatent une évolution des réseaux décidés à commettre des attaques de grande ampleur. Si la cellule de tête d'Al-Qaida existe toujours sous une forme "historique", la structure des réseaux semble s'être décentralisée par souci d'"efficacité". Des groupes d'activistes autonomes tentent d'enrôler des membres moins suspects, aux yeux des polices, que des personnes d'origine arabe, comme l'indiquent les arrestations, à Londres, de Pakistanais naturalisés britanniques.

How could the military model, retaliate and pursue, acquire the knowledge that autonomous cells, operating outside the area of offensive operations, were evolving, attempting to modify their demographic signature, attempting to evade targeting, and like the Internet, "routing around damage"? Forensic intelligence can be gathered only from the targeted and successfully engaged. Those that escape targeting aren't engaged, and no forensic, or intercept intelligence can be developed. That is the first thing that stands out from this summary. European anti-terrorist services, primarily law enforcement, not military in their force structure modality, have a catagorically different view of Al-Qaida than the US has, and not because the US offically "sees" Al-Qaida through W-colored glasses.

The second thing that stands out from this summary is that after three weeks of a review of the data available to them, the Europeans reached a profoundly different conclusion from the Americans. The US concluded that attack was an immediate possibility. The Europeans concluded that Al-Qaida itself is self-modifying, taking a phrase from the Marines -- Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome!

Please read the entire article, and the accompanying ones as well.

Posted by EBW at August 21, 2004 09:13 AM | TrackBack